The Ghosts of Christmas Past
by CarolineShea
Summary: Kurt and Blaine do some holiday visiting together at the Woodlawn Cemetery. Deals with Finn's death, the death of Kurt's mother, and the ways in which we grieve.


_The Ghosts of Christmas Past_

Blaine's knuckles are stark-white against the dark fabric of the steering wheel cover. His posture is straight, his shoulders set stiffly as he guides the Prius down the winding country road.

Kurt is slouched down in the passenger seat with his arms wrapped protectively around himself, appearing both smaller and younger than his twenty years would suggest. His eyes stare unseeingly out the window as they pass mile after mile of snow-covered fields.

Blaine eases the car around a slight bend in the road; Kurt moves his hands away from his midsection and begins toying with the ends of his scarf, smoothing it down nervously.

"About another mile," Kurt says softly, still lost in the quiet of his own thoughts, still staring at the white spread of snow on the ground rather than at his fiancé.

Blaine nods and reduces the car's speed a little; the entrance will be even harder to see than usual given the recent snowfall.

"It's... just up there, do you see behind that tree, over where — ?"

"Thanks, yeah, I see it," says Blaine. _I've been here before,_ he thinks, but he doesn't say it aloud. Kurt has been a jittery mess the whole ride up and if focusing on the directions helps him, then Blaine is happy to let him have the distraction.

Blaine flicks the turn signal on and makes a sharp left into the gated entrance.

The driveway is long; the distance to their destination is probably at least a mile. Blaine takes it very slowly and he removes his right hand from the steering wheel just long enough to give Kurt's thigh a quick squeeze.

"I'm nervous," says Kurt suddenly, the confession blurted out in a furtive, high-pitched whisper. "God, that's so — ridiculous, right? Why am I nervous?"

Blaine shakes his head, noting with concern that Kurt's hands are now twisting the fringe of his beloved Hermès scarf into restless knots. "It's not ridiculous," he says firmly.

Kurt doesn't answer; instead he drops his hands from the scarf and resumes staring blankly out the window.

Blaine slows the Prius down to a crawl. Both the snow and the early evening darkness have made the landscape difficult to distinguish, but he thinks they're close. He's startled out of his thoughts a few seconds later when Kurt touches Blaine's wrist with his fingers gently, a quiet signal.

Blaine taps the brakes. "Did we miss it?" he asks. "Is it — ?"

"No," says Kurt. "I'm pretty sure it's up ahead on the right."

Blaine pulls over and parks the car. Kurt fidgets with his seatbelt and Blaine walks around to the passenger's side to open the door for Kurt.

They walk hand-in-hand across the field, their boots crunching loudly in the snow. Kurt leads the way, and Blaine can tell the exact moment that Kurt sees what they've come for because he finds his hand squeezed in a sudden death grip.

Blaine sees the headstone a split-second after Kurt does and he freezes in place.

Kurt slowly unlaces his gloved fingers from Blaine's, takes two steps forward, and drops to one knee in the snow. He gently brushes off the fine dusting of white that coats the front of the stone and takes a deep breath.

"Merry Christmas, Finn," he says softly.

_0000_

_0000_

Kurt experiences grief as a fire living inside him. An unpredictable fire whose ferocity is dependent on the strength and direction of the surrounding winds.

Mostly it's just _there_ — a hot dull ache that has taken up permanent residence in his chest. It glows in him like the fading light of a banked ember, largely relegated to the background and painful only if he probes at it for too long.

But sometimes, often without warning, he feels it — a flame, twisting up darkly inside him, licking at his insides and burning out a hollow where his heart should be.

Kurt tries painstakingly to carve out time for his sorrow, to arrange moments when he deems it permissible and even appropriate to be sad. Those occasions are usually reserved for time markers such as birthdays or death anniversaries, but if he needs it he'll even permit them on the rare night that he finds himself alone in the apartment. He had allowed himself a particularly indulgent weep on the night of his engagement, thinking of all the things his mom would be missing out on.

But more than anything it's the unexpected flare-ups that Kurt dreads. Anything can cause ignition — a familiar phrase spoken by an unsuspecting someone, a picture, or even a fragrance. Kurt had been forced to go through his iTunes collection and meticulously weed out all the songs that Finn's voice had once belted out. He's cautious about turning on the radio anymore for that exact reason. That's a depressing legacy for Finn to have left behind, considering what a music lover he had been, but Kurt physically can't help it.

He thinks of the run-down diner where he and Blaine had stopped along the winding drive from New York to Ohio. A fellow customer had innocently selected "Don't Stop Believing" on the jukebox and Kurt, whose stomach had already been queasy from a combination of carsickness and greasy food, had been throwing up in the bathroom by the time the midnight train departed for anywhere.

Kurt feels powerless in these moments, totally overwhelmed by his emotions and paralyzed in his actions, and if over the years he has turned out to be just a _bit_ of a control freak, well… he won't deny it.

But he can't apologize for it either.

It helps Kurt keep himself in balance, which is a coping strategy he'd had to develop at a young age: Letting the grief exist in him without overpowering him. Letting it inform who he is without consuming who he is.

"Kurt?"

Blaine's voice startles Kurt out of his own thoughts; for a moment he'd forgotten that his fiancé was with him.

"Mmm?" says Kurt, gently tracing the looping script of Finn's name with his gloved index finger.

The wavering uncertainty in Blaine's voice paints a vivid picture; Kurt can see the anxious furrow between Blaine's eyebrows despite having his back to him. "Do you want me to... take a walk or go back to the car? Sorry, I just didn't — I didn't even think to ask, but if you want to be alone — ?"

"No," Kurt says at once, his reply both instant and heart-felt as he turns around to meet Blaine's gaze. "No, please stay. It's honestly a huge comfort to have you here with me, and besides, you..." Kurt's breath catches and he presses his lips together tightly. "...you loved him, too, Blaine."

Blaine's eyes glisten as he speaks, the wispy puffs of his breath visible in the ice-cold air. "Yeah," he says, with a smile so pained it looks like a grimace. "I really did."

Kurt takes in the expression on Blaine's face and feels a surge of protective anger course through him unexpectedly. Kurt had thought he'd encountered every emotion related to the grieving process before, but one of the most surprising things he's felt has been his sense of injustice on _Blaine's_ behalf.

Blaine, whose experiences with death consist of the loss of his elderly Great-Aunt Edna when he'd been thirteen and a beloved dog who'd been hit by a car when Blaine was ten.

Blaine, who has two living parents and four living grandparents. Blaine, who had been not just shaken but actually _outraged_ by Finn's death, as though he truly hadn't understood that the world could be that cruel or that senseless.

Kurt had been the one to call Blaine and deliver the news. And Blaine had been... like a child, and Kurt genuinely does not mean that in a condescending way. But the raw emotions spilling out of Blaine — fear, loss, bewilderment — had felt like such a strange counterpoint to Kurt's own sense of numbness and weary resignation.

"But Kurt," Blaine had said pitifully, between sobs. "Kurt, Carole has _already_ lost someone. She lost her husband, she lost Finn's dad, you can't lose two people, she can't, you _can't_ — "

Kurt had experienced a different sort of childhood than most of his peers.

When most children go to visit relatives over the holidays, they're not referring to the Christmas Eve walks Kurt and Burt had taken, boots trudging through the snow as they stopped to lay poinsettias on Grandmom and Granddad's graves before placing holly wreaths and mistletoe on Mom's.

Kurt has always tried to accept his lot in life with grace, but just... couldn't the world have let _Blaine_ keep his innocence a little longer?

_0000_

_0000_

Blaine steps toward the gravestone with all the trepidation of approaching an open casket. He pauses suddenly and turns back to look at Kurt. "Is it okay if I…?"

It takes Kurt a moment to realize that Blaine is wondering whether or not he can touch the gravestone, and he nearly has to bite back a thoroughly inappropriate laugh.

Apparently Blaine's easy confidence with people necessitates them having a pulse. Here among these slabs of rock standing guard over withered bones, they've finally managed to find a situation where Kurt is more at home than Blaine.

Gravestones, Kurt knows, can definitely be touched. They can be stroked, kissed, spoken to, or sung to without complaint. They can be drowned in tears and they will take absolutely no notice.

Blaine places his hand on the top of the headstone as he clears his throat. "Someone scattered a few pebbles up here," he says, touching one carefully through the fabric of his glove. "Is that… do you know what that's about?"

It's a death-related question, so it isn't particularly surprising that Kurt knows the answer. "It's a tradition in Judaism to place rocks on a gravestone. I guess… Rachel…"

Kurt can picture it in his mind's eye: Rachel's scarf fluttering in the wind as she bends to set the pebbles down, her dark curls spilling from beneath her knit cap, her face scrunched up as the tears slide freely down.

"Or it could have been Puck," offers Blaine quietly and _oh god,_ thinks Kurt as his heart gives a painful lurch, because he hadn't even _thought_ of that.

Somehow it's even worse than the image he'd conjured up of Rachel — Puck kneeling down in the snow, his jaw set grimly, bowing his head against the wind as he unfurls a clenched fist, spilling the rocks out of his hand and on top of the headstone —

Kurt shakes his head to clear it. _Get a grip,_ he tells himself.

"Hey buddy," Blaine murmurs, and it takes Kurt a confused second or two to realize that Blaine isn't talking to him. "We really miss you."

Blaine's eyes flick up to Kurt suddenly, their hazel depths wide and imploring.

"Do you think he knows we're here?"

From day one, Kurt and Blaine have tried to be honest with one another, and it's on the tip of Kurt's tongue to say, _No, Blaine, I don't._ But Blaine's wistful earnestness makes Kurt check his impulse and give a different answer — an answer that may, in fact, be more honest after all:

"I don't know, honey."

Because at the end of the day, what _does_ Kurt know when it comes to this? Really not all that much more than Blaine.

_0000_

_0000_

Finn Hudson had featured prominently in Kurt's thoughts even before their parents had become involved, and memories of him are never far from the surface of Kurt's mind. Neither are the potentialities — the paths and avenues Finn's life _might_ have taken that are now irrevocably dead-ended.

Even now: Kurt can feel the soft thud of the snowball Finn would surely have thrown at him; he can hear the echoes of Finn's laughter as the winter wind blows past him. He can picture the way Christmas Eve would have played out if Finn were alive: Finn and Kurt coming in from the cold and hanging up their wet outerwear side-by-side in the mud-room. Kurt, Finn, Burt, and Carole would have sat down together for dinner, and afterward Burt would have gone into the living room to start the fireplace. Carole and Kurt would have whipped up a batch of salted caramel brownies for dessert and Finn would have devoured them with all the gusto of a competitive speed-eater.

And then there was what had actually transpired at Christmas Eve dinner a few short hours ago. Carole had eaten nothing and had been nearly catatonic, staring out the window with red-rimmed eyes, replying to Kurt's gentle questions with mechanical one-word answers. Burt and Blaine had nibbled half-heartedly at the food, which even Kurt's inspired cooking could not make palatable under the circumstances. Kurt himself had been wrestling with a new manifestation of his OCD; his fingers had itched to fold everyone's napkin at the same corner and angle their forks and knives identically on their plates. And Blaine had been lost; he clearly hadn't known how to behave (not that anyone would) and had dithered between gentlemanly over-solicitousness and a nervous please-don't-notice-me silence.

Kurt had felt Finn's absence as acutely as an amputated limb. For all that their journey to stepbrotherhood had begun inauspiciously, the two boys had thoroughly embraced the title well before the time of Finn's death.

Finn and Kurt had complemented one another in unexpected ways. Their voices, although very different in tone and timbre, had always blended into a rich harmony. Their likes and dislikes had overlapped surprisingly often. Their personalities had balanced each other well — Finn had accepted Kurt's silences and periods of withdrawal far better than Blaine, for example, who still views them as either a personal insult or a sign of impending doom for their relationship. Finn's blessedly rare bouts of angst and melodrama had been easily overlooked by Kurt — no stranger to dramatics himself — and Finn's occasional and unintentional offensiveness had been met with surprising patience from his stepbrother, who had seen ample evidence of Finn's genuine goodness.

It's a strange parallel to what Blaine had said in his proposal speech, when he'd declared his belief that he and Kurt had been waiting for one another. Sometimes it feels like Kurt and Finn had been inexplicably drawn to one another from the beginning — Kurt looking at Finn with eyes of the _wrong_ sort of love, and Finn behaving more kindly to Kurt than high school propriety might dictate. Maybe Blaine thinks that he and Finn had been brothers in a previous life, each feeling the reverberation in this lifetime and recognizing something kindred in the other.

Kurt doesn't know how long he might have stood there at Finn's grave. The sharp bite of the wind against his ears and the pins-and-needles feeling at the tips of his fingers finally shock him out of his stupor.

"You okay?" asks Blaine quietly.

Kurt shrugs. "It's really cold," he says, which they both know isn't an answer.

"We can come back another time," says Blaine tentatively. "We can come back tomorrow or another day or — whenever."

_Since it's not as if they're going anywhere_, thinks Kurt mirthlessly.

"Seriously, Kurt, if it's — if it's too much —"

Kurt remembers the frantic thumping of his heart as his mother's casket was lowered into the ground; he remembers the silent scream stuck painfully in his throat. Kurt remembers gripping his father's hand so tightly that he'd thought their fingers might break and hadn't cared if they would or not. He remembers all of this and he thinks that his and Blaine's definitions of _too much_ might be different.

"I'm fine," says Kurt stiffly.

It's not Blaine's fault that he thinks of this visit in terms of how it affects Kurt, about his need for closure or catharsis. And Kurt finds it equally awkward to explain that his feelings about this cemetery visit don't particularly matter, because it's Christmas Eve and this is hardly a pleasure visit.

It's a _social_ call.

And visiting hours aren't over yet.

_0000_

_0000_

Kurt leads the way to his mother's grave. Blaine lags behind, following Kurt's exact path by stepping in the imprints his boots had left in the snow.

As they approach her gravestone, memories of Finn slip and shift sideways to make room for thoughts of his mother. Kurt has to compartmentalize his fantasies, because of course in the universe where his mother is alive, Finn would never have become his brother.

Unlike Finn's stone, which is new and achingly unfamiliar, this gravestone has been firmly committed to memory. To Kurt's horror, the gravestone will occasionally be the first image to rise to the surface of his brain when his mother's name is mentioned. Not her beautiful face — the features of which are becoming increasingly blurred in Kurt's memories — but this gray rectangular _rock_.

Kurt kneels down, murmuring a few words as he again dusts the snow off the face of the stone. He bows his head and closes his eyes for a few minutes, conjuring up as much about Kate Hummel as he can remember: the sound of her laugh and the sound of her singing voice, the silly hats she'd liked to wear, the smell of her perfume and her favorite shampoo —

"Does it get easier?" asks Blaine, with a breathless gulp at the end of the question. Kurt stands up and turns around to see Blaine staring anxiously at the gravestone, devastation etched onto his handsome face.

"I can't stand to think of you being in as much pain as you were then," says Blaine, his eyes glistening in the moonlight, "but judging from your face, I'm guessing that it hurts the same."

Kurt looks down at the ground. "In some ways, it does get easier," he says slowly. "But in other ways, no. Because — well, when you ask me that question, what you're really asking me is, 'Do you remember her less vividly?' or 'Do you think of her less often?' or 'Are there fewer people and things in your life that remind you of her?' And it's like... yeah. There are. But that's also a very painful thing to — to accept."

Blaine toes the icy ground with his left boot. "When you knelt down in the snow, I kept thinking about how much this reminded me of the Christmas Eve scene in Deathly Hallows where Harry and Hermione go to the graveyard to visit his parents. And then I thought, you know — it's really sad that up until this year, my only experiences with death and grief have been through fictional characters."

Kurt sighs and watches the ghost of his breath leave his mouth; it clouds the air for a second before dissolving in the wind.

"That's not sad at all," he says finally. "That's how it should be."

Kurt's voice cracks open on the last syllable, the sadness seeping into his body and overtaking him at last, and he only has a second to wonder how it's possible for his tears to be so _warm_ when every part of his face feels frozen solid. In the space of a heartbeat Blaine has tugged Kurt toward him and opened his arms. Kurt gladly sinks into them, wrapping his own arms around Blaine and tucking his face into the crook of Blaine's neck.

"Wish I could spin you a wreath of Christmas roses," murmurs Blaine.

Kurt chokes out a pained laugh. "I think you do quite enough for me as it is," he whispers into Blaine's coat. Blaine shakes his head in disagreement — Kurt can feel the movement of it even though his eyes are shut tightly against the fabric of Blaine's scarf — and Kurt brings his left hand up to trace the edges of Blaine's jacket lapel and says, "Yes, you do, Blaine. Yes."

Blaine's lips are a warm press against the corner of Kurt's jaw. "I love you," Blaine says fiercely, and Kurt _believes_ it. He feels the weight of Blaine's words comforting him; feels Blaine's love penetrating deeper than anything else he'd felt tonight, deeper than grief or doubt or fear.

"I love you too," Kurt whispers, feeling a tendril of hope twist deep in his own heart — a hope about the life he and Blaine plan to share together. He can see these visions playing out in his mind's eye as clearly as he can picture the memories of his loved one's lives: The apartment he and Blaine will share, the jobs they will take, the friends they will meet...

...and two blurry-faced, as-of-yet genderless children walking beside them in the snow, beckoning silently with laughing eyes, these smiling unnamed ghosts of Christmas future.

FIN


End file.
